La Casa

La Casa is a new entry on the Rochester scene and has "hipster vibe" written all over it.  It's in the South Wedge, in an old house, decorated with tattoo-style, graffiti painting on the outside and lots of wood beams on the inside. Plus the servers seem straight outta Brooklyn (via UR, Eastman or the RIT School of Craft).

My husband and I stopped for lunch.  La Casa's lunch menu is a bit odd in that everything involves "huevos," so we ordered off the dinner menu: enchiladas verdes (one of my all time favs) and enchiladas mole (one of his).  Chips and salsa are not free, but order them.  The salsa is smoky with a deep heat and the chips are perfectly salted.  Yum!

The enchiladas come with a side plate that includes small portions of lettuce/cabbage salad, whole black beans, refried beans, and yellow rice.  Both beans and the rice were more room temp than warm, so I'm not sure if that's the way they typically come.  The beans were tasty; the rice less so.  (We're kinda rice snobs after years of eating rice of the world in Miami--Peruvian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Cuban and others.  This didn't really pass muster.)

My enchiladas were very good.  The salsa verde was very "green" tasting (if you like verde, that makes sense)--bright, cilantro-y, acidic.  It complemented the enchiladas wonderfully.  His were okay--not enough mole so the enchiladas were a bit dry.

La Casa is not inexpensive, and to be honest, while the staff, decor and location are all far less hip, I prefer Itacate.  Their menu is both more adventurous (tongue tacos) and comforting (charros).  Still, La Casa has its charms, and soon after we were seated, the line for lunch was already out the door.  So, it'll be around for quite some time and is definitely worth a visit.